Cheshire East could end up with more houses than it needs because ‘greedy’ developers are ‘manipulating the market’ and making it impossible to come up with a five-year housing land supply, councillors claim.

Members of the strategic planning board argued they were in a catch 22 situation.

Deputy council leader David Brown (Con) told the meeting: “The reality is, in the way it’s structured at the moment, I think it is practically impossible for us ever to achieve a five-year housing land supply on the basis that, every house you’re short from the year before, adds up.

“I think we’re up to something like we’ve got to build 4,500 houses in a year to get anywhere near having a five year housing land supply which is just patently unachievable.”

He added: “This is going to be an issue until the Local Plan gets re-examined in the summer and these decisions [on planning applications] should be deferred or delayed until then because at the moment we’re open to greedy developers just coming in and developing just for their own greed and that’s what it’s all about.”

Haslington councillor John Hammond (Con) agreed and referred to the interim report of the Inspector examining the Local Plan, which referred to the imbalance of housing allocation – with too few being allocated for the north of the borough.

“We cannot keep adding houses in the wrong places,” he said, as the board was discussing an application for 120 homes for Congleton , which it later went on to turn down.

“It is not right. We’re going to have a Local Plan by default, not where we want the houses built.”

Middlewich councillor Paul Edwards (Ind) said residents throughout the borough were suffering because developers were getting planning permission and then not building the houses – so that didn’t count towards the figures.

“We’ve granted permissions for these different sites. We’re only getting so many built,” said Cllr Edwards. “So the developers are not building them, we’re not meeting our requirements because they’re not building them and then we end up having to put more and more in because of their lack of ability to do something.”

He said because of this ‘we suffer by having to put 20% on [to make up the shortfall] but we’ve already got those permissions in place, so if we keep adding to these it becomes a permanent circle...”

Board chairman Harold Davenport (Con) agreed with Cllr Edwards but stressed: “The point you make on the developers. It’s not they’re incapable of building them, I think they’re actually manipulating the market by not building them.”